Article: China: Our Internet is Free Enough

On 16 June 2010, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's "Technology Review" published on its website an article titled "China: Our Internet is Free Enough", written by Chief Correspondent David Talbot.

The full text of the article can be read free of charge here:

www.technologyreview.com/web/25592/?a=f

Excerpts: "China, with the most Internet users of any country in the world, has issued its first government whitepaper declaring an overall Internet strategy – one that advocates Internet growth while implicitly defending censorship policies amid global concern over online repression and China-based cyber espionage. 'I think this whitepaper is a statement that the Chinese Communist Party intends to stay in power, and also intends to expand Internet access, and be on the cutting edge of Internet innovation, and that there isn't any contradiction in any of those things,' says Rebecca MacKinnon, a China Internet expert who is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. [...]

"[T]he Beijing whitepaper makes a bold assertion: 'Chinese citizens fully enjoy freedom of speech on the Internet.' Left unstated is that Chinese Internet companies are under government pressure to self-censor, and do so very effectively on a slate of banned topics, including advocacy of democracy [...]. 'Frankly, I think China is Exhibit A for how authoritarianism will survive the Internet age,' MacKinnon says. 'I think Americans have this assumption that nondemocratic regimes can't survive the Internet, and I think that's naïve. The Chinese Communist Party fully intends to survive in the Internet age and has a strategy for doing so. So far, it's working.'"

Book: Freedom of Speech and Incitement Against Democracy

The (expensive) contributed volume "Freedom of Speech and Incitement Against Democracy" was edited by David Kretzmer and Francine Kershman Hazan and is based on papers presented at a 1996 conference organized by the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Kluwer Law International, 2000):

www.springer.com/law/international/book/978-90-411-1341-2

Back cover description: "While the protection of political speech is essential to the preservation of a democratic legal order, events of political violence and assassinations highlight the need to rethink questions relating to the boundaries of free speech in a democratic society. To what extent should democratic countries committed to freedom of speech limit those forms of extreme speech that may be considered as incitement to violence? This is a question that has long divided academics and activists alike. It has become even more relevant today, with the recent rise of extreme right-wing parties in various European democracies. In this book, leading scholars of constitutional law, human rights and criminal law, from various countries with divergent philosophies on freedom of speech, address the question of whether we can, and should, regulate speech in order to protect democracy and, if so, how."

The book is fully searchable on Google Book Search (including table of contents):

http://books.google.com/books?id=vayFsNouXEAC&printsec=frontcover

David Kretzmer is now Louis Marshall Professor Emeritus of Environmental Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Francine Kershman Hazan was, at the time of publication, Executive Director of the Minerva Center for Human Rights. She appears now to hold another administrative position at the Hebrew University.